nominaliseerivaid

Nominaliseerivaid is the plural form of the Estonian adjective nominaliseeriv, meaning “nominalizing” or “that nominalizes.” In linguistic discussions, it is used to refer to nominalizing devices or constructions that turn verbs or clauses into nouns or noun phrases. The form nominaliseerivaid appears when discussing multiple such devices within a sentence, for example nominaliseerivaid konstruktsioone (“nominalizing constructions”). The corresponding abstract process is nominaliseerimine, or nominalization.

Nominalization is a broad grammatical concept found in many languages. It enables actions, events, or descriptions to be packaged as nouns, allowing longer or more complex noun phrases within sentences. Nominaliseerivaid constructions may involve participles, verbal nouns, or other mechanisms that function as nouns within a larger clause. The exact realization and terminology vary across languages and linguistic traditions.

In practice, scholars compare how languages create nominal phrases from non-nominal material. English typically uses gerunds and infinitives to form nominalizations, as in “the discussion of the issue” or “to destroy” becoming a noun-like expression in certain contexts. Finnic languages such as Estonian and Finnish employ a mix of participial adjectives, nominalizing affixes, and related morphology to achieve similar results. The concept of nominalization, including its nominalizing devices and their inflected forms, is central to typological studies of how languages encode noun phrases from verbs and clauses.

See also nominalization, nominalizer, participle, affixal nominalization.